Peeple – assessment apps can be tools for cyberbullying

Authors: Lucas Lago and Silvia Regina Barbuy

Assessment Apps are among the most popular services in the internet providing options such as Foursquare and Yelp, made for assessing places and tools, and which support other Apps for products assessment in the Amazon, and film assessment in sites like Rotten Tomatoes.

Based on that, Julia Corday and Nicole McCullough founded a startup with the purpose of creating a new App – Peeple – which will allow people to assess and be assessed by each other the same way a restaurant is assessed by Yelp. Peeple is to be launched in November 2015.

The App has undergone strong criticism and has been adjusting its business model week by week. Originally, the App would work this way:

– When registering in the App, you would be able to assess any person of your list of friends;

– This assessment could only be edited by you;

– The assessed person would not be able to exclude your assessment from the App.

All the premises have been strongly criticized and the new App business model allows reviewing only people registered in the App. In addition, it will permit the assessed person to exclude bad reviews.

According to the creators of the App, its main objective is to improve “positiveness” and make it possible for people to use the reviews to make decisions in processes that involve people from hiring employees to personal relationships.

What happens is that the nature of personal assessments within a private scope is distinct from the reviews made public or in social networks. Because of their high degree of subjectiveness, and independent of being authorized by the individual object of the assessment, such reviews risk being taken as defamation (imputation of fact offensive to the reputation) or injury (offense to dignity or to decorum), thus, generating a growing litigation in the social networks.

With the adjustments that the platform has been undergoing, it is still not possible to assess its impact on issues such as privacy, safety and even its adhesion to the Civil Framework of the Internet. However, if the possibility of having the App as an aiding tool against cyberbullying is not taken seriously by its creators, many people will certainly not award the App five stars.